Hacker News Reader

Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that the silicon-based LLMs we have today do explicitly lack sentience.

Sentence, self-awareness, can only exist when you receive yourself as an input in some form shape or way.

These llms just don't do that. Technically recursive networks that we were using before the llms could, but these new models have no method but the context to understand their own state of mind.

And my knowledge they aren't currently trained on their own output when it comes to context, they're just trained on a data set that exists already. As a result they have no way of differentiating their own output from the input they get from the world. I don't see them being able to be sentient in any way as a result.

Which is not me saying they can't be, we just have to get to the point that we are training that into them somehow.

View on HN

> I would argue that the silicon-based LLMs we have today do explicitly lack sentience.

A fine argument could be made, but that argument rests upon the question of the degree to which you yourself are a LLM. You may not have any option of believing other than you do.

> Sentence, self-awareness, can only exist when you receive yourself as an input in some form shape or way.

Perhaps (you may not be able to realize that you only believe this, you don't actually know it), but how does one know it isn't being simulated in some manner by consciousness, which is further distorted by culture (ie: the culture we've been raised in severely underweights the importance of epistemology, and consciousness' "interesting" implementation of it)?

I do not think of my argument rests on the degree to which I am an LLM. I was fairly specific in speaking about the ways in which an LLM is different and the ways in which it lacks the functional capacity to be aware of itself.

I made a mistake here in in using the word sentient the way I did. To help you understand here, I use these words as follows.

Sentient - to be aware of yourself.

Sapient - to be humanlike in your ability to think and speak

Conscious - to have a self experience of any form.

What I am saying is that an LLM is definitely not aware of itself. It doesn't receive itself as an input, so it cannot have thoughts like "I'm happy right now". It's functionally incapable of doing so because it has to receive itself as an input in order to do that.

However, it's possible that such a machine still has a experience of some form in the sense that there is some ethereal consciousness created by the fact that exists and is thinking, but we can't observe that aspect of the world so it's not really something we can discuss in a functional way beyond speculation.

> I do not think of my argument rests on the degree to which I am an LLM.

That's the point - in fact, I would even speculate that you are may not be [currently] able to.

> I was fairly specific in speaking about the ways in which an LLM is different and the ways in which it lacks the functional capacity to be aware of itself.

Right, but don't forget that this is what you think, and what one thinks is typically what one "sees".

> What I am saying is that an LLM is definitely not aware of itself.

I tend to lean strongly in that direction as well, but I am a ~~strict epistemologist~~ pedant (in ~colloquial reality).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com